It’s a wrap.
I don’t know how many times I’ve attended BrightonSEO now but I can count them on one hand I think.
Wait, I logged all my visits in SwarmApp (Formerly Foursquare before the app split);
- Spring 2018,
- Autumn 2018,
- Autumn 2021, and
- Autumn 2022.
This is my fifth visit! However, this one was special as it was the first time attending both days. And even though my employer was kind enough to pay for this event (And two of my colleagues) I was so impressed that I got the super early bird tickets whilst I was watching the keynote speech (Sorry, Dr Pete!) #KelvinMayRegretThis
And so, what was this year’s spring conference all about?
Traditional Search Down, AI Up
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that “traditional” search has seen a massive change and the results no longer show “10 blue links” and haven’t done for some time. But, more than that, “zero click searches” are a thing and, again, have been for quite a few years (Rand Fishkin spoke about it at one of the previous keynotes I attended).
However, there was a report last year stating that clicks/CTR were down now by as much as 60%. What was particularly timely was that the study was released just before I had to report to a client that… clicks were down 33%. Despite all the effort it was a revelation and uncomfortable reporting this drop, but the reality was that they weren’t faring too badly in the grand scheme of things. All that hard work conducting traditional SEO was keeping their heads above water more than what was being seen elsewhere.
And that was why BrightonSEO’s Spring sessions included a lot of talks about AI search.
In fact, AI was the overwhelming theme. I don’t know how much it’s been a topic since late 2022, but ChatGPT was unleashed not long after my last visit to the conference, so I’ve missed over 3 years worth of sessions.
Trust as a Signal
By far one of the biggest topics, mentioned as headlines and in the body of sessions, trust was a big factor in this season’s talks.
With Google’s E-E-A-T signals, it’s that last one, trust, that seems to have been the most elusive. And just as you have the experience, you have the expertise, and you are the authority, it’s trust that is that external signal where you don’t really have full control. So maybe that’s why the ephemeral factor got so much attention.
And in many ways, trust is the new backlinks; you have to work hard to really earn it (them?).
With so many of the sessions either directly or indirectly mentioning trust, building the infrastructure to handle it, nurture it, and take advantage of it is the new holy grail. Well, this is SEO so it’s just one aspect to pay extra attention to.
Optimising for Entities
I stumbled across entities some years ago whilst becoming fascinated by Google’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool.
Whilst sentiment was an interesting score I chased in my copywriting, it was the entities that were the major aspect of NLP. And when ChatGPT unleashed a wave of “AI” tools into the public domain, LLMs, the engines behind NLP, search, and now these new generative tools, were mainstream as were their mechanisms. Entities are the people, the places, the actions, and the things in content that are vectored in LLMS, so these take centre stage in the new frontier.
In fact, they are so important that entity SEO is really now a thing. Felipe Bezon, who I remember from a previous conference, kicked off this year’s sessions with that very talk.
The Crucial Data Layer
Where vectors are the hidden connectors for plain sight text, so the data layer is another aspect that “just goes on in the background”. To the casual user, the datalayer is a “hidden connector” of all the things going on in a website session. Cookies and events go there, and they’re either not used, or barely touched, but there’s a rich seam of data there to be tapped into and, equally, to populate,
So in an age where the machines are out there trying to “understand” your website, as per the semantic web, then we must make sure our datalayer health is better than ever.
There was a statistic in one talk that seemed to say very few websites were really taking advantage of JSON-LD data, for example, but when I conducted further research, I maybe misinterpreted what was presented. I’ll reach out to the speaker and clarify before reporting back. But the data layer is crucial for “AI”.
(Sorry, not sorry – I wanted to write DataLayer all the way through this piece but spell checker didn’t feel as geeky as I did)
Agentic SEO
Whilst I don’t recall specific discussions in my sessions that covered agentic search, one of my colleagues mentioned that it had been raised in at least two of his technical SEO talks and he’d not previously heard the term.
Agentic can be viewed from two perspectives in SEO/search, and it’s either that we use agents to do SEO or we conduct SEO in such a way that it makes websites usable by agents. Either way, there’s the potential time-saving work of an AI agent to “do” your SEO, or at least, the tedious and time-consuming aspects. Or we can optimise websites so that AI agents can work their magic via your website and no human control – such as buying things for you.
Whatever we do next. agentic AI is an interesting concept and it;’ll be good to prepare for it.
AI Reporting
How is your website performing in search? What about AI? Are you appearing in ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Perplexity, Mistral, then Google’s AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Gemini? (Did I miss any? Sorry)
This area of AI search is still in its infancy. I use some basic SEMrush AI reporting but, in the run-up to the Adobe takeover and final acquisition (28th April 2026), it seems that more and more SEMrush features need to be paid for (Like reports too). Bing Webmaster Tools was first to report on AI mentions and citations, and Google Search Console still really needs to catch up (Big announcement at the next Google I/O anyone?)
But reporting on AI is still not where it should be. A colleague mentioned, before the talks, that we should look at server logs. It was mentioned again at one of his Brighton SEO sessions. Reporting has always been a bit of a pain, and now we have the added dimension of valuable AI
Contradictions
if there’s one thing that was of particular interest this year it was the contradictions.
There were some talks emphasising what we should be doing more of with our content whilst others said it wasn’t about content any longer.
Others said it’s no longer about keywords and hasn’t been for a long time, yet we’re being encouraged to work harder with entities which are, let’s face it, keywords.
Keywords aren’t keywords, they’re actually numbers. To machines anyway.
But that’s all good because SEO is about exploration and differences as well as similarities. There are so many areas of consensus that mean we think we’re on the right path, but when there’s a divergence in opinion, that’s where SEO is most exciting because it’s all about the pioneering, the testing, and proving that what you’re doing works, improves outcomes, and is “white hat”.
Conclusion
That’s my quick recap of what I saw and heard at the spring sessions of Brighton SEO, and I was so enthused that I was more than willing to go back in October for another two days. Let’s see what happens next time, aye?
And if you’re a local small business in Farnborough, Fleet, or any of the towns around here, and you need a highly experienced SEO for your WordPress website, drop me a note on my contact form and I’ll be more than happy to help you with what you need to keep your site competitive in this burgeoning age of AI.